About Waiting and Care in Pandemic Times

This is a collection of papers about time and care, written under conditions of lockdown in the UK in March and April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It represents the initial thoughts of a group of interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have been working together on a project called Waiting Times, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Waiting Times investigates the relationship between elongated temporalities, such as waiting, and practices of healthcare. As we found ourselves locked down alongside the entire population, being asked to wait in order to restrict the spread of the novel coronavirus, we were prompted to develop a response. This collection brings together perspectives from psychosocial studies, medical history, critical theory, psychoanalysis, performance studies and observations from clinical practice, to ask if and how waiting can be a practice of care, both for the present and for the future.